Why We Can't Wait (1964) is arguably the most vital book by one of the most important men in US history. Martin Luther King Jr. sets out the ideas that fuelled a large part of the 1960s civil rights m
John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know – so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine ol
What is the ultimate goal of any human society? There have been many answers to this question. But by producing a series of notably well-structured arguments, economist Mahbub ul Haq’s Reflections on
The story of the crusades has been told and retold in Western histories-but invariable from Western perspectives. Carole Hillenbrand's fresh interpretation drew on Islamic sources that describe the cr
Riley-Smith's 1986 book gives convincing case for a 'revisionist' view of the crusades, challenging the common belief that the crusades were motivated by fanaticism and were designed to plunder the Ho
Aristotle remains one of the most celebrated thinkers of all time in large part thanks to his incisive critical thinking skills. In Politics, which can be considered one of the foundational books of t
Franz Boas’s 1940 Race, Language and Culture is a monumentally important text in the history of its discipline, collecting the articles and essays that helped make Boas known as the ‘father of America
Most likely written between 170 and 180, Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of the em
Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 would not have taken place had it not been for the influential ideas set out by eight Iranian Islamic thinkers in the decades before it occ
Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As suc
Albert Bandura is the most cited living psychologist, and is regularly named as one of the most influential figures ever to have worked in his field. Much of his reputation stems from the theories and
Based on 20 months of fieldwork among the Azande people of South Sudan, Evans-Pritchard's work became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft. Although the book had little impact when it f
Frantz Fanon's 1961 masterpiece is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence.
Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action.Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a femi
What makes good people capable of committing bad – even evil – acts? Few psychologists are as well-qualified to answer that question as Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor who was not only the aut
Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people – many of whom had only marginal intere
For those who lived through the Cold War period, and for many of the historians who study it, it seemed self-evident that the critical incidents that determined its course took place in the northern h
Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift is an enduring classic of sociological and anthropological analysis by a thinker who is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology.The Gift exploits Mauss’s
American author, journalist, and activist Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She moved to New York City in 1934, where she became a journalist, writing for magazines including Arc
The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson criti
Do we need religion to be good people? When Immanuel Kant tackled this question in 1793, he produced a book that remains a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought.
Charles Darwin called on a broad and unusually powerful combination of critical thinking skills to create his wide-ranging explanation for biological change, On the Origin of Species.It’s one of those
C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is a perfect example of one of the most effective aspects of critical thinking skills: the use of reasoning to build a strong, logical argument. ¶Lewis originally wrote
English economist John Hobson’s 1902 Imperialism: A Study was an epoch-making study of the politics and economics of imperialism that shook imperialist beliefs to their core.A committed liberal, Hobso
In His book Gender and the Politics of History (1998), Scott draws attention to the fact that despite gender equality's long-term recognition there has been no genuinely revolutionary change unlike ec
Published in 1776, when America was teetering on the brink of war with Britain, Common Sense galvanized the colonists and George Washington's army, influencing not only the course of the Revolutionary
American scholar Jared Diamond deploys his powers of interpretation to great effect in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which seeks to understand the meaning behind the available evi
Mahmood Mamdani’s 1996 Citizen and Subject is a powerful work of analysis that lays bare the sources of the problems that plagued, and often still plague, African governments.Analysis is one of the br
The first work written for the general public by the highly influential American economist Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom argues that economies and societies work best when a free market func
Michael R. Gottfredson and Travish Hirschi’s 1990 A General Theory of Crime is a classic text that helped reshape the discipline of criminology. It is also a testament to the powers of clear reasoning
The work of memory researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch is a prime example of the ways in which good critical thinkers approach questions and the problems they raise.In the 1960s, researchers in
Nineteenth-century American politician John C. Calhoun occupies a paradoxical place in the history of political thought – and of critical thinking.On one hand, he is remembered as a committed advocate
MacLeod's 1987 work, ground-breaking for the way it combines field research with theory, follows the lives of two groups of young men from a low-income housing project in the Boston area to show how p
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system. Named after the laws tha
Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently
Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history – the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconf
Most studies of slavery are underpinned by ideology and idealism. Eugene Genovese's ground-breaking book takes a stand against both these influences, arguing not only that all ideological history is b
Best known for her novels, Toni Morrison enters the realm of literary criticism to draw attention to the often overlooked significance of race in literature.
Before the publication of Nature's Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, each following separate lines of development and maturity.
Ever since the nineteenth century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. Chang claims that, in fact, Fir
